Comments on the Smart Grid at theage.com.au

I submitted a couple of comments (21 and 22)  to the following article:

Power-hungry world needs to consider the nuclear option.

My basic point is that the Smart Grid with storage and renewable sources of energy should be considered a package that creates an energy system that is a realistic alternative to both coal-fired power stations and the proposed nuclear power plants.

Even with stand-alone renewable energy systems (SAPS) you usually have a bank of batteries to store energy and you have some other electronics (minimally an inverter) to condition the energy that comes from the solar cells and batteries before it is connected to the household load.

Comparing renewable sources of energy without also considering storage and a Smart Grid to baseload coal and nuclear is a case of making a strawman argument.  Of course, if you simply plugged renewable sources of energy like solar and wind turbines straight into the grid the result will be unreliable.

You need to have a scaled up version of the bank of batteries and conditioning electronics that you typically have for stand-alone PV solar cell systems and integrate that at scale with the grid for renewable sources of energy to be a viable alternative. That should not be a surprise.

A quote from one of my comments in the article at The Age:

There are many other benefits to building a Smart Grid with a storage capacity (even without renewables), with one major benefit being that you could level out the load over time. You could use off-peak spinning reserve to charge batteries and then use the batteries during peak load times. If you could level the load on the grid so that it doesn’t have major peaks and troughs, you might find that we wouldn’t need all the coal power stations that we currently use. The Smart Grid also provides a framework for integrating renewable sources of energy at all scales with the grid.

Power-hungry world needs to consider the nuclear option.

Even without adding renewable sources of energy to a Smart Grid with storage capacity, we could start to optimise energy distribution systems in such a way that we could close some of our coal-fired power stations. We would still need some peak load natural gas generators but they have far fewer greenhouse gas emissions for the power output, so again that isn’t a problem.

It is about time that we start to see the argument being put to the public in the media about energy systems, and especially the argument for nuclear power stations in Australia, as being essentially a Strawman argument.